T-27 hours before draft submission
As I sit here in the lab room working on my proposal draft in between running participants, I think to myself, am I going to be able to submit a proper draft by tomorrow? Recently I’ve been locking myself into a one person cubicle so that I’m not distracted by others but in the beginning weeks when I got to know the other people on this level, I’ve really enjoyed their company. Running participants and chatting to them has helped me get a better feel of what honours would be like. So far I’m liking it.
But, with that being said, nothing’s perfect. Whilst keeping busy and having a packed routine can be good and motivating for me, it can also be overwhelming attempting to juggle so many things at once. As a person who tends to mentally store daily tasks and reminders in their brain, I’ve found that using Google calendar or a diary like a normal person is probably better for keeping my stress levels in check. How do you guys keep on top of your busy schedule? Are there any apps you would recommend or is a simple calendar/diary the way to go?
To be honest, after reading Janice’s post last week I think I might even show symptoms of hoarding behaviour, especially if you look at the amount of tabs and windows I have open on my laptop currently. It’s not that old but the speed at which it’s operating right now is probably synonymous with a 1996 Macintosh. Nonetheless, it gets the job done and is still probably faster than the pace I’m getting this proposal draft done.
Having spoken to a few people about how their doing, I think everyone’s in the same boat, where right now it’s very unstructured and quite unpolished (I mean, it is a draft after all). I haven’t heard from some of you guys though, and you’ll probably ignore this post in an attempt to produce something substantial enough for Friday. But regardless, how has the writing process been? Have the writing exercises we did in the workshop help? In the workshop I was a little bit skeptical, but when I actually started working on it I found that the dumping all the information you can one was actually really useful. I was struggling to figure out a way to start the draft but when I just vomited out words and not caring about grammatical errors or sentence structure, it was a surprisingly pleasant feeling that I had at least written something down.
We’re almost at the halfway point of the semester and I can confidently say that this is the subject I devote the most time and effort into (don’t tell my other tutors). I’m more motivated to do well in this subject than others and it’s also been an enjoyable learning process in both the practical and academic sense. Are you guys the same or do you share the love equally among your subjects?
This week has also been the final session of coding for everyone and honestly I’m a bit sad that it only lasted 6 weeks. I would really have liked to continue improving my skills and I know I can do that in my own time, but it’s not the same when Damien is standing over me like a guardian angel helping me overcome any challenges I have. Nonetheless I was pretty happy with my first little Python baby that took 6 weeks to hatch (whereas the experiment I’m actually doing probably took Mike less than a day to code and is much more complex).
I hope everyone still has enough fuel left to keep going in this second half of the semester, and good luck with your respective projects and proposal writing!
Till next time,
Ray
